you worked right there with vice president biden. let me get your take on this. if we keep fighting about spending cuts and raeni ireinine spending, how come we haven't seen any real proposals for spending cuts? are we going to see that, you think? >> i do think so. i think we have to go through this, unfortunately. at least recent history suggests we have to go through this crisis mentality to get there. thus far, there's been $1.5 trillion in spending cuts that have been made. they're on the books. there's been $600 billion in tax increases made on the books. that's over $2 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years. doesn't get us all the way there, but it does get us largely about two-thirds of the way there to debt stabilization, at least within a ten-year budget window. >> russ, what do you think? of course, we are approaching this with caution. we know that there's going to be more back and forth. in the middle of it all, we have earnings season. you know, already some people are saying that this anticipation of all of these cliffs, cliff after cliff, ha